Blog Riffers: Building Content, Connections and Community

Yesterday, at the end of my post about how to connect with other bloggers, I hinted that I'd been stewing over an idea to help bloggers connect with each other. After that, I thought about it some more, got motivated, and now it's ready to go.

It's called "Blog Riffers". It doesn't cost anything -- in fact it's not even a product. It's a way of blogging that builds connections naturally between blogs and bloggers, and a badge you can display on you blog to let people know that they can connect with you this way.

Let me explain.

The Way of the Blog Riffer

Blog Riffing starts with what I've been advocating for the last few months -- starting a blog post with a quote from another blog, and adding your thoughts. If that's all there were to it, it'd be worth doing because:

It's a great way to get ideas to blog about -- you don't have to come up with a completely original idea to write something valuable, and by copying a quote, you've already got some starter material.

It naturally builds connections between blogs -- you link to the blog you got the quote from, and they'll often link back to you automatically through a "pingback".

With Blog Riffers, we take the concept a step further. If you display the Blog Riffing badge on your site (don't worry, I made badges in various sizes, so you don't have to use the 300x250 pixel image I'm using :-), when another Blog Riffer sees it, they'll know that you've got the Blog Riffing mentality.

What that means is that they can expect you to approve pingbacks if they Riff on your blog posts. There's no obligation to do so, especially if the "Riff" is really just a "Rip", where they grab a quote from your site but don't really add anything original -- so it's not going to enable sploggers to get links from your site.

Also, they'll know you're looking for blogs to Riff on. When a Blog Riffer Riffs on one of your posts, check out their blog. If you find something you can use to seed a post on your blog, you return the favor by Riffing on them -- that's called a "Riffback".

Deep and Wide

As a Blog Riffer, should you go deep -- Riffing repeatedly on the same blogs -- or wide -- Riffing on a wide variety of blogs?

The answer is both. Going wide will give you broad exposure to the readers of many blogs. Going deep will help you build relationships with the bloggers you resonate with best. Those relationships can then extend to more than just Riffs and Riffbacks.

So there you have it. No obligations. No monthly fees. It's all about building awareness of the Riffing method of coming up with ideas to blog about -- something lots of bloggers struggle with -- and building connections between bloggers so that we can bring our blogs down out of the stars, so to speak, and turn them into a web of interconnected islands with more traffic flowing through all of them.

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Get to Know Us

Hi.
I'm Antone Roundy.
I'm a strong believer in ethics, and have always tried to practice and promote ethical behavior in an industry where many slip over to the dark side.
At White Hat Crew, I'll share insights into internet marketing, with extra emphasis on ethical issues.